Technological Effects on Sales Reps

Online merely replaces clerks and stockers.

True sales professionals selling things that have value will always be needed. That said in the world of sales the vast majority of "professionals" are not very good at sales.

Too many people think sales is either clerking or pressuring/manipulating people to buy. But that allows a true sales professional to stand out in most companies. I'd say at 9 out of 10 companies you could become the top sales person in under a year just by learning the basics of selling and asking questions.

We make extensive use of marketing automation combined with integrated CRM to fulfill the lead generation, education (through extensive content marketing) and lead scoring. This eliminates much of the education process needed in a complex sale (I'm in tech solutions). I want my reps focused on SELLING to QUALIFIED PROSPECTS. So we rely far less on the traditional methods of direct selling because we can use technology to move a lot of the pre-sales function off the reps plate - leaving them to focus on directly engaging with quality prospects who are already up to speed on the decision process and further down the buying path within their own buying process.

Especially in enterprise sales to companies, the traditional model of "sales process" is company-centric. It solely focuses on your own selling and not on the customer's BUYING process. By aligning your own selling process to your customer's buying process, things become far more "self-serve", which now aligns marketing and sales (a traditional battle front). Our reps don't even SEE a prospect appear in the CRM system until an established level of measured engagement on the marketing side. But they can be sure that if an opportunity appears in the Active Opportunities tab of the CRM system, that prospect is fully engaged, educated, and ready to start talking about timeframes, budget, etc...

Some people criticize this as reducing sales to "order takers", which is woefully incorrect. It frees up their non-selling time to do more of what they're paid to do -- CLOSE SALES. They appreciate it as well because they're compensated based on production, and any education or other marketing-related activity takes time away from closing deals.

It also allows us to produce exponentially more sales with fewer resources, which makes me happy on the profitability and operations management side. I don't have to constantly be filtering the wheat from the chaff on the sales rep side - we can focus on a higher quality person (pure closers) and less on training them on traditional, old-school Joe Girardi Sandler Sales techniques... hoping and praying that our investment in this latest flock of gunslingers will result in a keeper.